Bonus episode: Can psychedelic therapy eradicate depression?

A conversation with Ronan Levy, industry pioneer and CEO of Field Trip Health,  a company that offers psychedelic-enhanced psychotherapy. 

Transcript

Cait Macleod:

Chances are you already know someone who has struggled with depression, anxiety, or PTSD. That someone could be, you. So I won't bore you with the statistics or an explanation of how crushing these conditions can be. Therapy medicine and lifestyle changes can make a big difference. But not always. Lives continue to be lost and others struggle without relief.

But what if there was a new treatment that could effectively eradicate depression and PTSD in our lifetimes? Limited research suggests that psychedelics could do just that. Drugs like magic mushrooms enjoyed plenty of attention from researchers back in the sixties before all of that was shut down as part of the war on drugs.

Now US veterans are lobbying for access to psychedelic treatments for PTSD. Some jurisdictions are legalizing psilocybin for medical use. And private companies are emerging to offer these new medical treatments. In short. Psychedelics are entering their second golden  age.   

You're listening to Wood for the Trees, the podcast about the messy questions. I'm Cait Macleod. On each episode of Wood for the Trees, I interview experts with different points of view to try to get to the bottom of controversial social and political debates. This series is all about crime, policing and justice.

And this is a bonus episode. You won't be hearing from two guests and I won't be butting in with my usual witty asides. This is just a very lightly edited conversation I had with thought leader Ronan Levy, some months back. He's the co-founder of Field Trip Health. A company that offers psychedelic therapy services.

I should also just add that this episode is not in any way intended as medical advice. Let's get started.     

Great. Well thank you so much for speaking with me. I think probably a good place to start actually would be just to talk a bit about your background. I had a little look at your LinkedIn and it looks like you've had quite an interesting career. 

Ronan Levy:

Yeah I like to keep it spicy, I guess.  Truthfully though my career is not emblematic of my initial direction in life. I was always a kid who was kind of on the straight and narrow went to high school with ambitions of ultimately getting into law school and becoming a lawyer because that's what good Jewish little boys do , and I managed to achieve it.

Cait Macleod:

Levy studied business and then law at the University of Toronto. He started his legal career in a traditional role but soon found himself getting into more unusual industries.

Ronan Levy:

I got into a role with a pharmaceuticals company, and then with MTV Canada and then an online dating company. And then I decided I was done being a lawyer. I was going to become an entrepreneur.  And then found myself working in the cash for gold business of all places.  And then subsequently in the cannabis industry, and then ultimately in the psychedelics industry.

So I call that my dissent into hell,  because in terms of reputational risk it increased every step along the way. And in terms of the prestige of the industries I was working in, it declined along the way.  But it's been a wonderful journey and, and I really wouldn't have traded it for anything else.

Cait Macleod:

Yeah, that's really interesting. I've done some freelance work where I engaged with a lot of lawyers. And the one thing that they seem almost obsessed with is risk. So I can imagine that the psychedelics industry would be quite an uncomfortable environment for a lot of people with a legal background

Ronan Levy:

It certainly would be. But what happened is that at various points in my career, I was fortunate enough to work with  people who had a very unique read on how the world works. And you know, for every lawyer who says, "Oh, you can't do that because of this regulation" some of those people would be like," Yes, that is what the regulation says. No one will do anything about it. And so you cross way beyond that regulation. So there's a lot of wiggle room to actually do what you want."

And, and the more comfortable I got with that and the more I realized that there's so much opportunity in the world that people aren't just willing to look at because either it comes with a potentially negative, social reputation like cannabis, when we first got into that industry and certainly in psychedelics, but you can create real positive impact.

You know, all of these industries in many ways sound a little bit fishy and I'm a first to recognize that. But the truth is we've had very positive impact and, There was a lot of opportunity there and I think that got me comfortable with taking risks that many lawyers certainly, but truthfully many people wouldn't take.

Cait Macleod:

So what got you interested in psychedelics in the first place? 

Ronan Levy:

You know, my interest in psychedelics wasn't born out of an interest in psychedelics. It was part of my own personal growth journey where I got tuned into the power of meditation, the power of self reflection, the power of analyzing myself and my emotions more importantly and leaning into that and I saw just how transformative doing that kind of work was.

And so when I heard about psychedelics and how the experience on psychedelics in many ways could replicate, in fact enhance a lot of the experiences I had done on my own personal growth journey. I realized that there was a lot of excitement and potential there, so that's why we started Field Trip.

Cait Macleod:

So what is Field Trip?

Ronan Levy:

So Field Trip is a global leader in the evolving psychedelic renaissance. We started with a mission to build the clinical infrastructure to provide psychedelic therapies and, for much of our existence, all we offered was our 12 Field Trip Health locations providing legal, psychedelic assisted therapies because unlike most approaches to medicine, psychedelics need to be done in a carefully curated environment.

They don't need to be done, but they ought to be done in a carefully curated environment to ensure that you have positive experiences and not negative experiences.

But now we're really expanding to be a platform for anybody exploring psychedelics  in whatever capacity. And have really worked towards generating awareness. We've pivoted our strategy recently to be what I call the center of gravity for the psychedelic movement.

Cait Macleod:

So what are the actual services and treatments that you offer?

Ronan Levy:

We have 12 Field Trip health centers, eight in the US, three in Canada, and one in the Netherlands providing psychedelic-assisted therapy. In the US and Canada it's ketamine-assisted therapy. Ketamine is an FDA approved drug approved initially as an anesthetic, but also shows powerful mental health benefits. And so we provide medically-supervised ketamine-assisted therapy, which means we provide ketamine typically through an intramuscular injection which induces a very psychedelic like state and a neuroplastic state that we pair very closely with psychotherapy.

You hear a lot of talk about the mental health benefits of psychedelics and there are many but the real impactful life-shifting benefits that come from psychedelics  is when you pair it pretty closely with psychotherapy. So not only are you having these experiences, you take the neuroplasticity that follow these experiences and use them to change your outlook, to change your habits, to change your lifestyle, to do all of the things that shift you out of where you were and positioning you to be in a much better place in in many ways.

In the Netherlands we do offer psilocybin-assisted therapy, psilocybin being the active ingredient  in magic mushrooms because it's legal to do so there. And in the coming years, we expect to be able to offer MDMA assisted-therapy, psilocybin-assisted therapy, potentially-LSD, mescaline-assisted therapies and all of the classic psychedelics as regulations and, and laws change.

So those are our treatments. Oh, and I'll just add the outcomes we're generating at our Field Trip Health centers right now, I genuinely believe are the most effective mental health treatments currently available anywhere in the market, bar none.

What we see is on average a person who goes through four or six ketamine-assisted therapy experiences with us sees their depression and anxiety scores, which are the metrics used to diagnose depression and anxiety primarily go from severe- so someone's really struggling- to mild symptomology. And those benefits can be sustained for four months or longer. We're actually seeing it's going out more than four months right now. So we're seeing sustained profound benefit without the need for daily regimens of antidepressants or other drugs.

And I'm not aware of anything that's generating outcomes like this. We hope to be able to publish a study shortly. It's just in its final phases of edit, going through our results, but the net outcome is - to ruin the surprise a little bit - is that what we're offering works really, really, really well, and most conventional treatments do not.

So we're really proud of, of what we're doing for people. So that's our treatment program. That's primarily targeted for depression and anxiety and PTSD. But we'll be expanding the scope of what indications we can treat with our treatment programs.

We also have our app, which is called Field Trip which is a tool designed to support anybody on a psychedelic experience. So there's music, there's meditations, there's reflection prompts, and journaling for the integration work, which is taking the insights that come up and trying to translate them into your life.

And that is going to continue to be a, a foundational piece of Field Trip,  because the truth is, as profoundly effective and wonderful as our treatments are in our clinic, there are way more people using psychedelics on their own in the underground, you know, not necessarily being supported as well as they could, and with the tools and information that should be available.

And so our app has become, it seems, the go-to place for everybody who's looking for that kind of support.  We're closing in on about a hundred thousand downloads right now. Purely organic growth. It's always just kind of been peripheral to our operations, but now is becoming a much more central focus because the growth of interest in psychedelics is exponential right now.

7.1 million Americans last year were open about using psychedelics, which means the number's probably a bit higher, much like Trump voters. Not everybody wants to come out of the closet yet,  so to speak. And that was in 2021. And certainly the media awareness around the world, around psychedelics from, you know, Aaron Rogers to Harry Styles, to Jayden Smith is certainly accelerating the conversation. So I wouldn't be surprised if that number, you know, looking back from 2023 to 2022 is doubled which is a big proportion of the population. And they're looking to us for, for guidance. And so, our digital tools are gonna become an important part of that.

And then we also actually have a psilocybin research facility at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. There's actually 200 species of psilocybin producing fungi out there. Most haven't been studied, most haven't been cultivated very well. And so there's a big opportunity to really start to understand all of these psilocybin producing fungi. Find out what makes them work. We're doing research on that as well. So that's what Field Trip is. It's a melange of things. I like to call it an ecosystem now. But that's what we're doing.

Cait Macleod:

Let's just go back to what you said there about outcomes. Because it sounds like this could be. An absolutely massive game changer for mental health treatment is that right?

Ronan Levy:

So it really is profound  like it really is quite wonderful, the impact of these drugs. We are incontrovertibly in a mental health crisis. One in four people globally is going to experience some sort of diagnosable instance of depression or anxiety at some point in their lives. A quarter of Americans over 18 are being prescribed antidepressants. Let's call a spade a spade. Psychiatry has been a massive failure.

Right now, if you're suffering from PTSD, it's very likely that your psychiatrist or general family doctor will prescribe antidepressants. And the standard of care that most hope to achieve with antidepressants is about a 30% improvement in symptoms.

What we're seeing in the phase three trials with MDMA-assisted therapy is that about 70% of participants are effectively cured of PTSD, meaning they no longer meet the criteria to be considered a PTSD patients. 70%.

You know, that is incredible. When you think about people trying to achieve a 30% improvement in symptoms, that's what's currently available to 70% of people  effectively being cured with no severe adverse events being reported. really is orders of magnitude much more effective.

And you know, we're seeing similar kind of results with psilocybin-assisted therapy and the treatment of depression.

Cait Macleod:

That does an incredible, in fact it sounds too good to be true. You know, you mentioned there that these treatments have no severe adverse effects, I think you said. And I think the first question that a lot of people will have is: How safe are these drugs? Are there any side effects? Is there a risk of addiction? Can you talk about some of the concerns and skepticism that someone might have about using what has up until recently been an illegal drug?

Ronan Levy:

Sure. Happy to go into that. So I was definitely one of those people as well.  When I got to the cannabis industry, I didn't really use cannabis. I had used it a handful of times. I'm still not a big advocate, so I'm not coming from the position of, of, you know, someone who's always been an advocate from day one and just trying to push their political agenda. I got in from the perspective of interesting opportunity from a business perspective and philosophically, the war on drugs seemed to me to be a catastrophic failure. So if we can start to unwind that policy, that was a good thing. Whether it was medical cannabis or we were just giving people, you know, legal protection to not worry about doing something that's otherwise pretty much harmless. That was cool for me.

What I saw when we got into the industry was that cannabis was a profoundly effective medicine genuinely changing people's lives. And, and so that's what opened me up to exploring the conversation around psychedelics, which again, when I got into the psychedelics industry, I'd never really used psychedelics. So I wasn't coming from a place of advocacy as coming from a place of now having my eyes open by cannabis and, and the impact of that.

So what I'm about to say, please take with like the deference that I say, but all of that skepticism that's rooted in all of us, that was rooted in me, was perpetrated pretty much by a conscientious and overt political campaign that was designed to alienate when it started in the 1960s the black population and the counter culture hippie movement, who were a threat to Nixon's administration.

That sounds like conspiracy theory. I get it. There's actually tapes of Nixon and his advisors perpetrating this plan and formulating this plan. So it was a very conscious, non-scientific effort to demonize psychedelics and cannabis back in the day that led to the war on drugs. It was not scientific or data driven.

The big shift, particularly around psychedelics actually came out of the UK. And was driven by the Beckley Foundation and Amanda Fielding in the UK who just kept the light on continued funding research where is available and continued to forward.

A lot of that research ultimately led to a study being conducted by Professor David Nutt, who is a professor at Imperial College in the UK, who at the time was, I don't remember his exact title, but it was approximately the executive director of the UK's council on I think illicit drug.

Essentially for any Americans listening, the drugs are the person responsible for, for fighting the war on drug. And he was appointed into that position. And to David's credit, he did not wanna take a policy based approach to fighting the war on drug. He wanted to take a scientific and data based approach to the war on drugs.

And then, so he commissioned a study that was published in The Lancet and also ultimately picked up by the Economist which demonstrated that of a list of 30 or 40 drugs, some illicit, some pharmaceutical, the drugs that had the lowest harm profile based on harm to self and harm to others were psilocybin, LSD, ketamine, MDMA. I mean, they weren't, I'm, I'm not saying that list exactly, but they were at the very bottom of the list.

And if you looked at the top of the list, the most dangerous drugs in the world, heroin and alcohol were at the top. So, It was this big revelation moment where we realized, "oh, psychedelic drugs are actually quite safe" .

So what do I mean by they're quite safe? With most classic psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD, trip, domain based psychedelics and as well as others there's virtually no risk of addiction. There's no risk of dependence. In fact, they're anti addictive in many ways, which is to say you. Too much of it, your brain stops responding to it.

Um, so it just doesn't work. So there's no, you, you can't really get addicted, unlike tobacco and alcohol where you can continue to opt to meet the, the cravings. That does not happen with, with tryptamine-based psychedelics.

There's basically no LD50, which is a reference to what is the overdose level, for classic psychedelics. There was one case report where a woman, I think in Canada took 10,000 micrograms of LSD, which is about 400 times bigger a typical dose of LSD. She was sick for a couple of days, but there was no long-term side effects. In fact, the long-term effects of what seemed to happen is she swears it cured her bipolar disorder.

So we're talking about drugs that are non-addictive and that you can't overdose on. So everything you thought may exist with psychedelics in that respect completely debunked.

The other thing people talk about is the risk of the so-called bad trips. I mean, we all probably saw the movies and all that kind of stuff, and I'm not gonna say that there's not a risk of a bad trip happening but we need to talk about it a little bit more contextually, which is the current belief, the current data suggests that there's no such thing as a bad trip per se.

There are two kinds of experiences, ones that are very pleasant, warm, beautiful, inspiring, and ones that can be very emotionally challenging and big bring out past experience in a very dark way. Easy trips speak for themselves.

Challenging experiences can actually, and we've seen it firsthand at Field Trip, and the clinical data seems to support this can actually be the most transformative,  the most effective therapeutic experiences in the whole psychedelic arena. If properly supported, if it's paired with psychotherapy and a team of people who know how to help you work through the emotions that come up, because they can be incredibly intense, incredibly challenging, and incredibly scary.

There's no doubt about that. But with the proper support, leaning into those emotions seems to generate the  most profound breakthroughs for people  whose lives are fundamentally changed by a single experience. Now, if not properly supported, then a challenging experience can become a bad one and could potentially create its own instance of trauma.

But if you do the work, if you pay attention to set and setting, which refers to doing the preparatory, you know, work in terms of mindset preparation, thinking about what you want your experience to be, what you want to get out of it. If you do it in a setting where you feel comfortable and supported by people who are trained to support you the risk of a bad trip is very, very low.

And so it's, it's generally not a major concern. It's not zero. I'm not gonna say it's not zero, but you can really reduce the risk of it. And even if you do have a challenging, with the proper support, it's probably going to be a positive, cathartic, therapeutic experience on the other side.

So in terms of long term side effects, virtually non-negative almost all positive. In fact, it not only improves depression scores and anxiety scores, we seem to see psychedelics improve creativity scores, empathy scores regard for the planet. So there's all of these wonderful pro-social side effects that go along with it as well. That is what the evidence suggesting now.

Now, could that evidence change? Certainly. But there seems to be thousands and thousands of studies from the 1960s to present that say, psychedelics won't make you go insane. They're not going to affect your DNA or rearrange your genetics or anything along those lines. By and large, you're probably gonna have a good experience and you're gonna feel great afterwards. And if you have a bad experience, if you, if you're thoughtful about it, you can actually make that into a good experience. That's what the data says, right.

Cait Macleod:

Do you screen your patients at all and turn people away that you think are inappropriate for the, for the therapy?

Ronan Levy:

Yes. We certainly do. Some of that is not necessarily entirely grounded in it's necessarily a high risk for that person. It's, there's the medical judgment involved and the risk benefit analysis and so for certain people, people who have schizophrenia, have severe bipolar. generally people whose you know, nexus to reality can be tenuous at some times. Generally, psychedelic assisted therapies are not appropriate for them.

Generally. There's some evidence to suggest otherwise, but when you look at the risk benefit analysis, the risk of further exacerbating their condition probably does not justify the benefit. But for most people, psychedelic assisted therapies are probably appropriate and safe depending on the circumstances.

Obviously, if you're a pregnant or or a nursing woman, there's gonna be considerations with that. With ketamine, it can increase blood pressure, so if you have uncontrolled blood pressure, probably not the best idea for ketamine assisted therapy. Again, it's risk benefit analysis.  But again,  for most people, these are generally safe and, and can be positively used.


Cait Macleod:

That's very interesting.  How mainstream is this in the scientific and also in the mental health community?

Ronan Levy:

It's a good question. It's, it's, it's really hard to make that assessment.  But I can point to some of the things that I see that may provide a degree of objective consideration. So I believe it was last year, there were more studies published on psychedelics and psychedelic assisted therapies than other forms of antidepressant treatment.

So I think that that inversion just happened last year. If you go back to the sixties, LSD was probably the most studied drug. Period. There were thousands and thousands of articles about LSD. Obviously after the 1960s, that virtually disappeared, but started percolating up again around 2000. And I think, like I said, last year, there are more studies on psychedelics than other antidepressants as far as I'm aware.

What's interesting, and this is just anecdotal,  when we got into the cannabis industry, we got almost uniform pushback from the medical community. Our last business was a company called Canadian Cannabis Clinics. We started medical clinics to help people who are interested in medical cannabis assess whether it's appropriate for them. And then we actually had doctors doing assessments and prescribing where appropriate.

So it was a very medically founded company and it was hard as hell to get doctors to work for us. Initially. Over the course of about a year or two, that attitude shifted and almost, you know, we were getting referrals from over half the family doctors in the province of Ontario.

So it was a really quick flip, but in the early days, there was a lot of pushback and a lot of skepticism. Interestingly, when we started Field Trip in 2019, the attitude was much different from the therapist community. I guess psychedelics have been a more germane conversation for a long time.

Within the psychiatrist community, there had been enough new studies showing incredibly positive reason for hope that many psychiatrists actually seemed very open to this conversation. Not necessarily that they're prescribing or that they're going to prescribe, but there wasn't that same level of resistance like we saw in the cannabis industry.

And for good reason too. You know, I, I think it was about 2015 an article on ketamine was published by a number of authors, including a gentleman by the name of Dr. Thomas Insel  he was the director of the National Institute of Mental Health in the US. So a publicly funded body,  and he published a study in which he made the statement  that ketamine is probably the most important breakthrough in depression treatments in the last 50 years. And so someone with that credibility, making a statement like that, I think was a pretty pivotal shift in terms of how people think about psychedelics or at least  the medical community.

Cait Macleod:

So let's talk a bit about regulation. What is the landscape like now? Um, what are you allowed to do? What are you hoping to see in the future?

Ronan Levy:

Sure. So just about everywhere in the world, ketamine is an approved medicine. It was approved in 1970 or so as an anesthetic. And actually a lot of the current research around psychedelics was a byproduct of the fact that many ER docs who used ketamine as an anesthetic also seem to see that patients report positive mental health benefits, and that triggered an interest in exploring ketamine as a mental health treatment.

So just about everywhere in the world, ketamine is an approved drug depending on the jurisdiction, but in North America, I think in the UK as well, in most jurisdictions, it can be prescribed off-label, which means a doctor can prescribe it even if it isn't specifically indicated for mental health treatments.

It's very common for doctors to prescribe things off label. It sounds like it's a little bit dangerous. It's not. It happens every single day.  Anytime you're getting prescribed an antibiotic, odds are it's being probably prescribed off label because it probably got approved for a specific infection and that's not the infection you have. And so the same thing applies here, which is ketamine can be prescribed in  most jurisdictions as a mental health treatment.

The classic psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD are still scheduled, which means they're still illegal in most jurisdictions in the world. There are some exceptions presently. Jamaica: psilocybin, LSD, and the classic psychedelics are not illegal. They're kind of unregulated. In the Netherlands, psilocybin truffles are legal. And a few other countries, psilocybin is legal, or at least unregulated.

We're seeing the regulatory  landscape shift positively. So in the state of Oregon, in the US early next year, they will be implementing what's called the Psilocybin Services Act, which will creating a legal market for psilocybin therapy. Even though it's still technically illegal at federal law in the US, on a state level, it will be legal. Colorado will probably approve a similar program in the next couple of weeks.

In the midterm US election, the province of Alberta in Canada just announced that it was going to make access to psychedelic therapies legal provided that there's psychiatrist oversight. So jurisdiction by jurisdiction, we're seeing things actually start to change on what I call like a legal or political level.

And then there's the regulatory level, which refers to specific approvals by the FDA or Health Canada or EMA. And what we're seeing there is it's expected that MDMA assisted therapy will be approved by the FDA sometime next year or early 2024 for the treatment of PTSD. Psilocybin probably within a year or so after that. And so you'll see specific psychedelic medicines approved for certain indications.

So it, it's changing rapidly. But by and large, with the exception of ketamine, most classic psychedelics are still considered illegal though enforcement seems to be non-existence, I think most jurisdictions have taken a non-enforcement policy around possession of the classic psychedelics. Even though the law hasn't changed, the practice of it really has changed.

Cait Macleod:

If you were in charge of setting regulations for psychedelics, what kind of policies would you have? Would you have people able to access them for recreational use or for use at home? Or would you require people to get them in a medical setting? What would be ideal?

Ronan Levy:

Are you gonna ask for my true political stripes?

Cait Macleod:

Haha, you don't have to .

Ronan Levy:

No, no, no. I'm happy to. Like, my approach is less founded on, you know, dogma as opposed to just like the practical realities of the world, which is, as a simple example, Canada was the first G7 country to legalize cannabis for adult recreational use. And they went way overboard in trying to regulate the production and distribution and sales and marketing  and the grand effect of all of that was everyone still bought their weed from a dealer underground cuz it was too expensive and too complex to go to the legal market.

So  it's just a, a really good indication that. You know, policy usually is well intentioned, but creates unintended consequences. And so the, the policy I would endorse and, and not fully baked, is like I absolutely think that this should be approved as medicine. Not exclusively, but what medical approvals enable is insurance coverage and therefore the people who are most in need should be able to access these therapies without being concerned about the cost considerations.

And so I think that that should happen and we should continue to see all of these approvals at the same psychedelics have very profound benefits for I believe most people out there. And so there should be a way for people to access these experiences without necessarily having to have a medical diagnosis of depression or anxiety because if you don't have that, then you don't have access.

So I think the approaches generally being taken in Oregon and Colorado, I think they may be a little bit heavy handed, but their approach for legalization is to say that, If you don't have to have a medical diagnosis, all you have to do is show that you're of age 18 or 21, and that you don't have something that would deny or justify denying you access. So if you have been diagnosed schizophrenia or severe bipolar, that's an exclusion criteria. But if you're not excluded, you are included. I think that's a right approach.

There's a lot of discussion around how much training a therapist or a guide or someone overseeing a psychedelic experience should have. That's really complex because didactic training is not terribly helpful when these are fundamentally experiential processes. So my approach would be to, you know, kind of let the market decide, which is, if you want to go and have your buddy oversee your psychedelic experience, cool. You understand the risks associated with that.

Or if you want to go, you know, find a trained psychotherapist who, who's overseen thousands of sessions before, probably more expensive. But that option  is is there as well. But if you just create these programs that make it incredibly hard and expensive for people to sign up or get access, then you're just gonna create incentives for people to keep going underground.

And I think the most important thing is, Let's bring it above ground. Let's ensure safe access and supply. Let's strongly encourage conversation, information, education, and then, you know, let people make their own informed decisions. So we don't create some of the perverse consequences that come from well-intentioned, but probably ill-conceived regulations. That that's where I would.

Cait Macleod:

Just on what you were saying there about, you know, having your buddy be your kind of guide through an experience is, you know, in my experience with mental health care, with psychiatrists and psychologists, some are fantastic, but there are some out there who are not great regardless of their experience and their licenses.

So I mean, when people are, are in these experiences, presumably you're quite vulnerable and is there some worry around having people support you in that experience who may be motivated by money or may simply not be particularly good at their job. And, and what are the risks associated with that?

Ronan Levy:

Yeah.  That is inevitably a risk. It's inevitably a risk when we get up and we go to the pub and have too many drinks, right? So it's not a unique risk to the psychedelic space. And the answer is, and I know a lot of people don't like it, but I think it's a true answer, is like some people are going to have bad experiences, they're gonna deal with bad actors and that's gonna be terribly unfortunate.

Again, though, I go back to the fact that we have psychiatrists and therapists who are already bad actors, right?  You know, those risks already exist in whatever context already.

So I think what we need to do is instead of trying to eliminate that risk altogether, which is impossible in the first place, is focus on education, informing people and then, you know, ensuring that there's the right tools and resources and support available for people who do have a bad experience. That that would be my approach.

Cait Macleod:

So obviously you're supportive of cannabis and psychedelics being legalized. And you say you have a pragmatic attitude. So does that mean you'd support the legalization of other drugs too? 

Ronan Levy:

Yeah.  I do believe that all drugs should be legalized and safe supply should be insured. You know,  the driver of most opioid deaths in the US right now are the fact that, the drugs that people are getting in the underground are cut with fentanyl. That's it, so if you want to prevent deaths, ensure people can have access to safe supply, that's probably the most important thing.

And we've seen the effect of it. I know I, I'm not sure about the UK, I know the US is pretty backward on this kind of stuff, but Canada is relatively progressive. You know, we have safe injection sites and all that kind of stuff.  So we're not perpetuating , HIV and other blood borne diseases. And it works, it works really well.  And it's prevented overdoses because, you know, if people, someone is going to overdose, they're gonna do it in an environment where people are equipped to do something about it.

 So I personally believe that access to all drugs should be legal. Generally speaking, there may be some, you know, I don't think fentanyl should necessarily be broadly available, but maybe we'll say like all naturally occurring drugs  just to ensure safe supply.  And then education, which is we see people starting to wake up to the harms of alcohol and alcohol consumption is on the decline.

That's great. You know, that doesn't, didn't involve making it harder to get alcohol. It involve changing the conversation. So I think, I think respecting people's autonomy, giving them information, and, and then providing support  if something goes wrong is the best policy.

Cait Macleod:

Great. Well, that actually covers all of my questions, but are there any other kind of myths or misconceptions or bits of information that you think it's useful for people to know if, as they're kind of moving along this spectrum you were talking about?

Ronan Levy:

Yeah, so I mean, it's not just that psychiatry has been a massive failure, it's also, the mental health crisis is also just like a condemnation about how we're living our lives, right? Like it's about the food we eat, how we interact with people, how much time we spend on Zoom or on our phones, how much exercise we get, where we find our passion and motivation, what we do day to day. You know, those are all the reasons that, we're in this mental health crisis.

Certainly psychiatry hasn't responded and psychiatry creating this notion that it's, that depression is a brain disorder has probably exacerbated it. It has helped some people. But it really is a condemnation of like, we're doing something wrong in our society and I think we need to recognize that on some levels.

And I think what psychedelics can do is maybe help us change the narrative around that. Help us change the narrative of who we are or what should we value or how we interact with people. I think that's what psychedelics are profoundly effective at doing.

You know, I think it was from Fight Club, um,  "we spend our days making money to buy things we don't want to impress people we don't like." It's like that's how most of us are living our lives to some degree. And, and I think psychedelics can be a catalyst that can shift that. Again, it's not the answer, but it, it's a start. And that's what's really exciting for.

Cait Macleod:

Great. Well, Ryan, thank you so much for your time. It's been really interesting. Pleasure. Have a good day.

Ronan Levy:

You too, Caitlin. Bye-bye. 

Cait Macleod:

That's it for Wood for the Trees. If you enjoyed this episode, why not subscribe? And if you'd like to support the podcast, you can leave a tip at buymeacoffee.com/woodforthetrees. For more information, visit cantseethe wood.com or you can get in touch at cait@cantseethewood.com

Thank you so much for listening.